Innholdsfortegnelse for June 5, 2023 i The New Yorker

Kelefa Sanneh (“Pop Up,” p. 42), a staff writer since 2008, is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.” JiaTolentino (“Front Man,” p. 26) became a staff writer in 2016. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” came out in 2019. John Seabrook (“The Trials of Ed Sheeran,” p. 18) has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.” Hila Blum (Fiction, p. 60) is the author of “How to Love Your Daughter,” which won the 2021 Sapir Prize. Hanif Abdurraqib (Pop Music, p. 84), a contributing writer at the magazine, is a poet, an essayist, and a cultural critic. Jena Friedman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25), a standup comic, is the author of “Not Funny: Essays on Life, Comedy,…

Nora Ephron’s iconic romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” from 1989, posed the age-old question of whether a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman can ever be just friends—and came down staunchly on the side of “nope!” “Platonic,” a new comedy series on Apple TV+, goes the other way. The show, created by Nicholas Stoller, stars Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen (reunited after playing a married couple in Stoller’s “Neighbors” films) as Sylvia and Will, a pair of old drinking buddies who have fallen out of touch. In the meantime, their lives have accrued emotional mass: Sylvia is married with children and feeling restless, Will is schlumping through a painful divorce. When the two reconnect, they give each other permission to lean into improvidence; they get high, they destroy property,…

Last year, Molly Bloom, a freelance editor, moved into a new apartment, in Flatbush, and quickly befriended a neighbor named Lilly Lam, who mentioned that she designed signs for the Department of Sanitation. “My dad made an art work for the Department of Sanitation!” Bloom said. Bloom’s father is Rick Meyerowitz, the illustrator and humorist, the creator of the poster art for “Animal House” and more than a hundred features for National Lampoon. In 1986, at a time when he was busy producing illustrations for magazines, movies, and ad campaigns, he got a call from an art director at Ogilvy & Mather Direct, which had the Sanitation Department as a client. It needed a logo for its new recycling campaign. The city was asking its residents to sort their trash—voluntarily,…

It wasn’t the singing; it was the song. When Deanie Parker hit her last high note in the studio, and the band’s final chord faded behind her, the producer gave her a long, appraising look. She’d be great onstage, with those sugarplum features and defiant eyes, and that voice could knock down walls. “You sound good,” he said. “But if we’re going to cut a record, you’ve got to have your own song. A song that you created. We can’t introduce a new artist covering somebody else’s song.” Did she have any original material? Parker stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head. No. But she could get some. Parker was seventeen. She had moved to Memphis a year earlier, in 1961, to live with her mother…

In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Everything about the line was designed to provoke: the selection of a bookish and easily horrified audience, the unapologetic violence of “drag” and “drown,” the porcelain specificity of “bathtub.” As propaganda, it worked magnificently. When I arrived in Washington, two years later, as a novice political reporter, the image still reverberated; to many it seemed a helpfully blunt depiction of what conservatives in power must really want. Republicans were preparing to privatize Social Security and Medicare, the President had campaigned on expanding…

At 9 P.M. one recent Saturday at Superiority Burger, the chef Brooks Headley was ricocheting around the dining room. A profile in GQ revealed that he clocked about thirty-five thousand steps, or roughly seventeen miles, each night. And who could blame him? For six years, he spent the majority of his time in the three hundred square feet of the restaurant’s original location. Earlier this year, he relocated to the relatively sprawling space that, for decades, had housed the Odessa Restaurant, a beloved East Village greasy spoon. The original Superiority Burger offered just six dishes, plus specials and desserts. (Headley began his kitchen career as a fine-dining pastry chef.) All of it, including the eponymous burger, was vegetarian; a lot was “accidentally vegan.” Everything popped. The move, theoretically, might have…

Last weekend, the New Art Dealers Alliance fair filled a building on Twenty-second Street, in Chelsea, with contemporary art, people hoping to sell or buy it, and those simply wanting to see and be seen. Also: some elementary schoolers hawking Country Time lemonade and art works (heavy on the Popsicle sticks and Sculpey) made by fellow-kids, for a cause—specifically, the Children’s Museum of the Arts’ Emergency Arts Education Fund, which pro-vides assistance to public schools whose budgets have been slashed. Under a tent on the building’s roof, a yellow wooden lemonade stand had been erected and painted with the prices of art works ($25, $50, or $100; buyer’s choice), lemonade ($5, $10, or $20), and tote bags ($50). Across from the stand, a café offered cans of San Pellegrino limonata…

At ten o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the rapper Flo Rida was in his dressing room with a towel over his head, in a mode of quiet preparation. Along one wall, a handsome buffet—lobster, sushi, Dom Pérignon—sat untouched. Flo Rida, whose stage name honors his home state but is pronounced like “flow rider,” is fastidious about his physique. He is six feet three, two hundred and twenty pounds, and often travels with a trainer, though on this occasion the trip was brief enough that he would do without. That afternoon, a private jet had carried him, along with eight of his backup performers and assistants, from South Florida to Chicago. By the following night, he would be back at his mansion in Miami. Flo Rida, who is forty-three, attained…

When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. The unassuming resting place of the long-deceased author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” tucked behind the bustle of King’s Cross station, had a sort of aura. The daughter whom Wollstonecraft, stricken in child-birth, never got…

On January 15, 2019, Paul Simon dreamed that he was working on a piece called “Seven Psalms.” He got out of bed and scribbled the phrase—alliterative, ancient-feeling—into a spiral notebook. From then on, Simon periodically woke between 3:30 and 5 A.M. to jot down bits of language. Songwriters often speak about their work as a kind of channelling—the job is to be a steady antenna, prepared to receive strange signals. Some messages are more urgent than others. Simon started trying to make sense of what he was being told. This month, Simon, who is eighty-one, released “Seven Psalms,” his fifteenth solo album. It’s a beautiful, mysterious record, composed of a single, thirty-three-minute acoustic track divided the into seven movements. Simon’s soft, neighborly voice has yet to be shredded by age…

Presidential campaigns are usually launched in a bright burst of hope. Slick videos are posted, bus tours of the hinterlands are announced, e-mails seeking donations flow into in-boxes like the tide. The candidacy of Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, contains some extra, darker emotional layers: defensiveness, a bristling ideological fixity, an undercurrent of dread. In a new poll, DeSantis is down nearly forty points to Donald Trump among Republican primary voters. Yet this month DeSantis set out on the trail—a barbecue joint in Iowa, the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire—hoping to make a good first impression on voters who do not follow politics obsessively and who may have missed the latest fallout from the arcane war he insists on prosecuting against the Walt Disney Corporation. Then, on Wednesday…

POSTPARTUM-ANXIETY ANXIETY: Anxiety that occurs when you think you may have postpartum anxiety after reading about it on an online message board you came across while struggling to breastfeed your colicky newborn at 3 A.M. INSTA-MOM AFFECTIVE DISORDER: Feelings of sadness associated with scrolling Instagram, compounded by the fact that the algorithm now knows that you’re a new mom and has started flooding your feed with videos of other new moms making it all look so easy, as well as ads for stuff you might not be able to afford but will buy anyway because you haven’t slept in months and your defenses are down. POSTPARTUM AMAZON AMNESIA: An impulse-control disorder that involves purchasing every single baby-related item on Amazon that any person or ad recommends, in an effort to help your baby…

ACROSS 1 Jabba, for one, in “Star Wars”5 Reception dishes, briefly9 “What ___ God wrought?”13 “God willing,” in Arabic15 Harpo Productions founder, familiarly17 2009 No. 1 hit for Lady Gaga [P-p-p-]18 Confiscates20 Read, as a QR code21 Narc (on)23 Autos in a series of “art cars” painted by Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer, among others24 Opening of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”?26 1966 No. 2 hit for the Beach Boys [Ba-ba-ba-ba-]29 Swollen30 Follower of ad or Mad31 Descriptor for some radio stations32 Diva’s opportunity to shine33 Vaccine-watchdog org.35 Go (for)37 Novelty clothing item, at times40 1974 No. 1 hit for Elton John [B-b-b-]44 Band performance45 Next-___ (advanced, as tech)46 Mac platform with Yosemite and El Capitan versions47 Direction of most morning traffic on the George Washington Bridge48 “The White Lotus”…